PORTLAND, OR.- Te Moana Meridian: How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It is a new experimental opera based on a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution to formally relocate the international Prime Meridian to the South Pacific Ocean. Showcasing the world premiere of this opera in partnership with PICA’s TBA Festival and Boom Arts, the Portland Art Museum will present evening performances of the opera in its Kridel Grand Ballroom on September 6, 7 and 9 at 7 p.m., and a matinee performance on September 8 at 2 p.m.
Created and directed by Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton), the opera centers around two principal vocalists, Holland Andrews (NYC) and Mere Tokorahi Boynton (Aotearoa/New Zealand), and their delivery of the proposal as a striking operatic declaration, sung side-by-side in the antipodean languages of English and Māori. Meanwhile, an intergenerational choir swirls through austere architectural lighting with primordial oceanic liturgies as artist sidony o’neal embodies the Prime Meridian and charts their collective vector through space and time.
“In questioning how the Prime Meridian—that imaginary line that governs how the world collectively orientates global time and space—came to be, Te Moana Meridian builds a case for why it is high time the United Nations considers relocating it from its current location in Greenwich, London, to its antipodean coordinates in the open waters of Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa / the South Pacific Ocean,” says opera creator and director Sam Tam Ham. “A location as physically and metaphysically removed from the specters of colonial Western imperialism as possible. An oceanic antidote to our political afflictions. Where nature reigns and human relationality is clear. And the perfect place to locate an axis of our shared global commons—Te Moana Meridian.”
Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton, born 1984) is an independent, working-class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa (New Zealand) of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent, based in Portland, Oregon. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline.
“Te Moana Meridian is a production grounded in deep meditations on our contemporary world and a serious sense of play and speculation, while offering us brighter possibilities and surreal beauty,” says Grace Kook-Anderson, the Portland Art Museum’s Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art, who has previously showcased Sam Tam Ham’s work in a 2017 APEX exhibition and public programs at the Museum. “These are signatures of Sam’s masterful works.”
